


When He Wakes

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Tending Wounds, a speculative fic that will never happen, discussion of Framework!Fitz x Madame Hydra, literally this fic is FitzSimmons in a room together and that's all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-27 02:47:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10800105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which Framework!Fitz has his wounds healed.[a speculation fic, pre 4x20]





	When He Wakes

When he wakes, eyes heavy and head groggy, the room is grey and brown and crumbling—exactly the opposite of the smooth cool whiteness at the Triskelion. It would be his first clue that something has gone very wrong if he couldn’t feel the slim cool metal of cuffs around each of his wrists and the throbbing pulsing burn of a wound in his side. He jerks before he can control himself. Pain shoots up and down his limbs and he bites his tongue to keep from groaning.

“Shh, shh,” a voice says, even though he didn’t make a noise, not a single sound. “Don’t move too much.”

The hot ball of anger that sits at his core nearly spats out that he can hardly move too much if he’s chained to a bed, but he will not tolerate that kind of weakness, even in himself. Certainly not when it might give these rebels, these subversives, a chink in his armor. Gritting his teeth, he twists his torso away from the hands plucking at his shirt and feels his brain blink out for a second. A nearly silent inhale provides little comfort, and he struggles to reach through the fog to remember what happened.

“You got shot.” The voice answers his unspoken question in a tone halfway between annoyance and alarm. “And they refuse to let me use their precious store of antibiotics so for God’s sake hold still so it can heal properly.”

They may not have given him antibiotics but they’re certainly feeding him painkillers, he realizes as his eyes try to droop shut again. The better to subdue him, he imagines, until they’ve got their response ready. He forces his eyes open and stares at the ceiling, unwilling to give them the satisfaction of either sleep or eye contact. “Want me in good health so you can torture me without guilt?” he manages to sneer.

“We’re not going to torture you.”

His eyebrows crease into the shape that looks like pitying amusement and masks surprise.

“Yes, really. I won’t let them.”

He shouldn’t give her the satisfaction. He knows reacting at all will only play into their hands, knows this is all a mind-game, knows they’re just looking for a sign of weakness to use against him, against Ophelia.

He looks anyway.

The woman, Jemma Simmons, looks back at him.

His heart beats sideways for a second and he feels his breath quicken, all the dull nauseating guilt and uncharacteristic self-doubt that crashed over him the last time he saw her face returning in full-force. Her scream still resonates in his bones—”Fitz, no!”—even though it isn’t his name and he only did what was required. _But what if it wasn’t?_ that tiny voice that sounds like his mother asks for the millionth time. He pushes her away savagely. _Do not allow the womanly emotions to overcome you_. It’s harder to remember when his razor-sharp mind is dulled, but the pain that causes him to dam back a hiss reminds him. “You,” he says through his teeth. “We’ve been looking for you.”

She sets her mouth into a firm line as she places one hand on either side of the burning sensation. Even through the rubber gloves she’s wearing he can feel how cold her hands are, as though she’s been sitting with them in buckets of ice. Sparks sizzle out at the contact, bringing a strange sense of relief—but he doesn’t allow himself to enjoy it. If he hurts, he’ll remember who he’s supposed to be.

“Yes, me,” she says, carefully removing the dressing even though he can’t feel anything that light. “You found me again.”

 _Again_ , he wants to question, but doesn’t. He knows the answer she’ll give anyway. More of the lies meant to distract him, to make him turn from his true purpose. Instead he says, “if you mean to use me as a hostage, it won’t work. Madame Hydra will never negotiate with traitors and terrorists, not for me or anyone.”

He watches something flash in her eyes, but she keeps her attention on her work and he can’t decode it. “I thought she valued you more highly than that, with how close she keeps you.”

“Of course she values me,” he snaps, “I’m her right hand, the only person who understands her, the one person she can rely on. She loves me.”

“That sounds like she uses you to me.”

Of course Ophelia uses him; why wouldn’t she? She needs him, and he would do anything for her. If he wasn’t beginning to feel the tug of the painkillers again, he’d explain, but his eyes are drifting closed despite himself, and the ache in his side seems to lessen wherever she touches it. Instead he contents himself with “You don’t know anything about it.”

“Not about that, no. But I know I would do anything to save the man I love.”

The woman, Jemma Simmons, spreads a clean bandage over his side, all her movements delicately precise, her voice high and shaky. He is utterly at her mercy and yet he knows she is the vulnerable one.

From the depths of his thoughts, a sentence he hasn’t allowed himself to think about swims to the surface. “Skye and Radcliffe,” he says, hearing his own voice through cotton wool and not quite recognising it, “they said that I am the man you love.”

Her hands stutter as they smooth down his torn, bloody shirt. “That’s so,” she says quietly. “So you might ponder what I am doing to save you now.”

He hears two beeps as he loses the battle to keep his eyes open. Something soft and cold brushes across his forehead. “Don’t move around too much, or you’ll tear your stitches,” she whispers, and he slips back into sleep with that gentle order in his ears.

 ----

When he wakes, slightly more alert but in just as much pain, she is there again. Or still there? It’s hard to tell in the shadowy room, but the dark caverns beneath her eyes suggest she hasn’t slept very well. “I’m still alive,” he croaks. “I don’t know what you were hoping for.”

“I know you’re still alive,” she says briskly, snapping on another pair of gloves, “and that’s all I’m hoping for at present.”

“Because you love me.”

She sucks in a breath, turning her back to retrieve something from a medical tray just out of his reach. “Yes.”

“Love is a weakness,” he says, because if it wasn’t, if she didn’t love him, the Resistance would have had him tortured or killed already. He’s sure of that. And that would be infinitely the best course of action for them to take.

“Then why do you love Madame Hydra?”

Her voice is like a buzzsaw, jagged and cutting, and he stills, his breath coming quickly. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.” She turns, a thermometer in her hand, and it’s a harmless instrument but he is a little afraid of her anyway. “I assume you do, at least. I’m happy to be wrong.”

“I do,” he says, as he always does.

“Then why? If love is a weakness, why do you love her?”

“Because—”

But he stops. She is right. His father has told him, over and over, that regret, that sympathy, that trust, that friendship, that _love_ are only opportunities for someone else to gain power over you. Ophelia has all the power in their relationship and always has, even before they were—so why would his father encourage him to love her? Shouldn’t he be telling him to protect himself against her as much as he can?

“And if love is a weakness,” the woman, Jemma Simmons, adds casually, “then why would she love you?”

“She doesn’t have any weaknesses,” he snaps, then shudders at the stabbing pain that motion sends through him.

“Then one of your premises is wrong,” she says, her chin high. “Either love isn’t a weakness, or she doesn’t love you. Or, perhaps, both.”

A wave of nausea washes over him and he has to close his eyes again to keep from being sick. “And wouldn’t that be good for you,” he manages to grind out, “since you’re convinced I really love you?”

“I don’t care one way or the other. She isn’t real. Your relationship, or whatever it is, isn’t real. This bloody _world_ isn’t real, so whatever happens here doesn’t change the actual facts of reality.”

“Which are that you love me and I, apparently, love you.”

“Yes,” she says, not a trace of doubt in her voice.  

“Why?” he asks, telling himself it’s information gathering, telling himself it’s to keep her off guard, telling himself anything other than what he suspects is the truth: that he wants to know why someone would love him, since he doesn’t love himself.

“Why do you love me?” She laughs, incredulous. “I still cannot fathom it, to be honest.”

Bile rises in his throat again, but he shakes his head. “No.”

“Why do I love you?” This time, her laughter spills out giddily, like water gushing up from an underground fountain. “Because you’re the best man I know. Because you’re kind and loyal and loving and brilliant and funny and awkward and good. Everyone should be in love with you; I just know your heart better than anyone, so the privilege is mine.”

He listens to the list of character qualities and knows that none of them are his. He trained himself out of being that man long ago. She doesn’t love _him_ , she loves someone else that shares his face, and he tells her so harshly.

“The thing is,” she says, “this isn’t like _Fringe_ . This world isn’t equally real to the one we come from; there is no other version of you. There is you, and there is the twisted role AIDA is making you believe is you. But it’s not. I _know_ your heart, Fitz.”

“Why do you all call me that?” he asks, managing to crack an eye open. “No one calls me that.”

“That’s the name you chose,” she says. “If you give me half a chance, I’ll choose it too.”

The air in the room is suddenly feels heavy, like its oxygen balance has gone awry, and he knows she’s just said something important, but before he can parse it out the contents of his stomach come violently up, and she is holding his head while he is sick, and she doesn’t seem to mind how the ugliness splashes over her.

 ----

When he wakes, flames licking out from his side to spread through his veins, he can’t tell for a minute if he’s actually left his nightmares behind or not—it’s still dark, still cavernous, and he is still alone. He shouts anyway, as loudly as he can manage, because if his whole life has led to him dying alone in the dark his whole life has been spent pursuing the wrong ends. No one should die like this.

“Fitz!”

He recognises the chill of her hands now. They fly to his side, stroke his forehead, check his pulse, are everywhere, and the whole time she is pleading, “no, Fitz, not this way, don’t leave me like this, just hang on a bit longer, it will be all right soon, no, Fitz, I love you I love you I love you.”

His grasp on reality is tenuous, but he has enough mental energy to think that it might be worth being this other man if it meant someone would care for him like this.

 ----

When he wakes, sweaty and exhausted, his wrists have lost their metal bracelets. Instead, one of them is wrapped in gauze and the other is undergoing tender ministration with a cool gel of some kind, smoothed in by now familiar fingers. “I’m not your Fitz,” he says aloud, and for the first time those words sound like a lament.

Jemma Simmons is silent for a moment, her thumbs making circles over his pulse point as his hand lies, palm up, in both of hers. Then she lifts their hands to her face and blows gently across the place she had been tending, sending chills up his spine. Down the length of his arm, her face is inscrutable. “I wish you believed me that you are. But I will tell you until you do.”

“You could have let me die,” he says, knowing that he came very close. “It would have been justified.”

“Why?”

“Why?” His thoughts are still hazy, so he can’t understand what she’s asking. What could be more justified? Then he remembers that she doesn’t know who he is, and he tries to make her see. “I watched them torture your friend. I’ve watched them torture many people, and built the machines that did it. I killed that woman just to prove a point.”

Her eyes drop to their hands, then meet his with steady surety. “That’s the first thing I’ve heard you say that sounds like you.”

“Your Fitz tortures and kills people?” he asks, horrified to find that tears are welling in his eyes. Her Fitz is a good man, a kind one; he should not have the same blood on his hands.

“No!” Her fingers clench around his, loosening when he flinches at the pressure but remaining twisted together longer than they ought to. She shakes her head and reaches for another long strip of gauze.

“No,” she says more calmly. “You don’t, but you blame yourself for things other people do. You didn’t do those things, Fitz. That’s another thing I’ll tell you until you believe me, as soon as we get out of here.”

No matter what he says, she will not listen. He can’t be the only one who has told her what he is, what he’s done, and she’s still here, gentle and steadfast. She is a losing battle, he acknowledges, and takes a deep breath. Closing his eyes as she begins to wind the bandage around his wrist, he concentrates more on the soft rasp of her calluses against the smooth skin of his forearm than the ache around what’s left of his heart. It isn’t much, not after so many years of starving it, but for the first time since he was a child, he finds himself unable to even attempt control. He’s so tired, and confused, and lost. She can’t be right, but he wishes she was.

As he drifts back into sleep, his fingers curl around her wrist. He doesn’t try to stop them.

 ----

He is asleep, or nearly, when she kisses his forehead and whispers “come back to me.” But when he wakes, still in that dark crumbling room with gauze on his wrists but a new-old light in his eyes, he says “always, Jemma. The whole damn time.”

 ----

When he wakes, jelly-legged and aching, he stumbles off the ledge into her waiting arms. He can feel her tears against his neck as she struggles to hold him up and he regrets sharply that she’s always having to support him but knows that he would be lost, utterly and entirely, without Jemma Simmons. She kisses his shoulder, his jaw, his temple, while her hands ruck up under the shirt and smooth over where his avatar had a lumpy bandage. “Fitz, Fitz,” she says in between kisses, like she’s naming him for the first time and claiming him as her own from a million other people. And between her truth and her touch, he knows himself again.


End file.
